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ROS Foxglove bridge

Use the ROS Foxglove bridge to visualize your live ROS 1 or ROS 2 data via the Foxglove WebSocket connection.

The Foxglove bridge connects your ROS stack to Foxglove via the Foxglove WebSocket protocol. It is implemented as a C++ node for high performance and low overhead.

Overview​

The foxglove_bridge uses the Foxglove WebSocket protocol, a similar protocol to rosbridge, but with the ability to support additional schema formats such as ROS 2 .msg and ROS 2 .idl, parameters, graph introspection, and non-ROS systems. The bridge is written in C++ and designed for high performance with low overhead to minimize the impact to your robot stack.

Installation​

The foxglove_bridge package is available for ROS 1 Melodic and Noetic, and ROS 2 Humble, Iron and Rolling. Earlier releases of ROS will not be supported due to API design and/or performance limitations. The package can be installed with the following command:

sudo apt install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-foxglove-bridge

Launch​

Start the foxglove_bridge from your ROS workspace using roslaunch in ROS 1 or ros2 launch in ROS 2. Optional configurations and their default values are below.

ros2 launch foxglove_bridge foxglove_bridge_launch.xml

Add foxglove_bridge to your launch file if you plan to use it anytime your robot is online.

Configuration​

Configure bridge behavior with the following parameters. Set parameters at initialization via a launch file or the command line – they cannot be modified at runtime.

Configuration​

Parameters are provided to configure the behavior of the bridge. These parameters must be set at initialization through a launch file or the command line, they cannot be modified at runtime.

  • port – The TCP port to bind the WebSocket server to. Must be a valid TCP port number, or 0 to use a random port. Defaults to 8765.
  • address – The host address to bind the WebSocket server to. Defaults to 0.0.0.0, listening on all interfaces by default. Change this to 127.0.0.1 (or ::1 for IPv6) to only accept connections from the local machine.
  • tls – If true, use Transport Layer Security (TLS) for encrypted communication. Defaults to false.
  • certfile – Path to the certificate to use for TLS. Required when tls is set to true. Defaults to "".
  • keyfile – Path to the private key to use for TLS. Required when tls is set to true. Defaults to "".
  • topic_whitelist – List of regular expressions (ECMAScript grammar) of whitelisted topic names. Defaults to [".*"].
  • service_whitelist – List of regular expressions (ECMAScript grammar) of whitelisted service names. Defaults to [".*"].
  • param_whitelist – List of regular expressions (ECMAScript grammar) of whitelisted parameter names. Defaults to [".*"].
  • client_topic_whitelist – List of regular expressions (ECMAScript grammar) of whitelisted client-published topic names. Defaults to [".*"].
  • send_buffer_limit – Connection send buffer limit in bytes. Messages will be dropped when a connection's send buffer reaches this limit to avoid a queue of outdated messages building up. Defaults to 10000000 (10 MB).
  • use_compression – Use WebSocket compression (permessage-deflate). Suited for connections with smaller bandwith, at the cost of additional CPU load.
  • capabilities – List of supported server capabilities. Defaults to [clientPublish,parameters,parametersSubscribe,services,connectionGraph,assets].
  • asset_uri_allowlist – List of regular expressions (ECMAScript grammar) of allowed asset URIs. Uses the resource_retriever to resolve package://, file:// or http(s):// URIs. Note that this list should be carefully configured such that no confidential files are accidentally exposed over the WebSocket connection. As an extra security measure, URIs containing two consecutive dots (..) are disallowed as they could be used to construct URIs that would allow retrieval of confidential files if the allowlist is not configured strict enough (e.g. package://<pkg_name>/../../../secret.txt). Defaults to ["^package://(?:\w+/)*\w+\.(?:dae|fbx|glb|gltf|jpeg|jpg|mtl|obj|png|stl|tif|tiff|urdf|webp|xacro)$"].

ROS 1 only:

  • max_update_ms – Maximum number of milliseconds to wait in between polling roscore for new topics, services, or parameters. Defaults to 5000.
  • service_type_retrieval_timeout_ms – Max number of milliseconds for retrieving a services type information. Defaults to 250.

ROS 2 only:

  • num_threads – Number of threads to use for the ROS node executor. This controls the number of subscriptions that can be processed in parallel. 0 means one thread per CPU core. Defaults to 0.
  • min_qos_depth – Minimum depth used for the QoS profile of subscriptions. Defaults to 1. This is to set a lower limit for a subscriber's QoS depth which is computed by summing up depths of all publishers. See also ros-foxglove-bridge/#208.
  • max_qos_depth – Maximum depth used for the QoS profile of subscriptions. Defaults to 25.
  • include_hidden – Include hidden topics and services. Defaults to false.
tip

If you are having trouble connecting to the bridge using IPv6, try setting the address param to address:="'::'"

For example: ros2 launch foxglove_bridge foxglove_bridge_launch.xml address:="'::'"

Development​

To build from source or to contribute to the project, check out the ros-foxglove-bridge GitHub repo.